It took me dragging 5 people in to get a time code change into the event system in Linux. Linux is to the point where it doesn't do anything revolutionary any more. I ended up writing a specific driver to deal with a generic USB issue in order to get the thing into the kernel. All the USB firmware for keyboards is ripped off from all the other firmware, so the cheap keyboards are all doing encoding of shift keys in band instead of using the 8 bits out of band. But I fixed exactly one because trying to fix them all got shot down. On the plus side, it works with Chromebooks and Android phones, so guess what? I don't care any more.

Sorry, but how do those people you posit get the "What has red hair and lives in a test tube? Bozo the clone" joke?

Also: under 50.

The people I know are pretty much geniuses,

Peter Wemm is a genius.

I am not a fan of Marissa; she has this anti-genius bias that will bite her in the mediocrity. I can definitely see why she has made the decisions she did, however. Normal nerd vs. genius nerd is a "slow and steady" approach. It will not serve her well, but it is understandable.

Good reason for working local....

You can not inculcate a corporate culture change with remote workers without at least a token presence at the ground zero. It just does not work to state that "the company has changed" without forced acknowledgement that it has changed.

Marissa did the right thing here, even though it's not clear her overall direction is "the right thing". Remote workers do not "buy it" and if they don't, everything breaks down. Not sure that her direction is right, but pointing "there" instead of "somewhere over there, I won't be there" is a net win.

It'd be GREAT if intellectual property would be treated as real property!

Then I could use a patent troll's patent, and if they didn't stop me within some relatively short period of time, I could claim Adverse Possession, at which point I could choose to put it in the public domain. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession for how this applies to real property. The point is, if the true owner of the property isn't using it (because trolls do not produce any useful goods or services), and if my use is exclusionary of the true owner (try entering an established market and competing with "free" without being excluded), it's mine.

Issuing credit/"badges" for technical fields makes no sense, if you lack the common vocabulary to be able to communicate with your peers about complex topics, or lack the theory necessary to be able to generalize a solution and apply it to an entirely new problem.

If you are talking instead about society valuing blue collar labor less than white collar labor, then the educational system or trade school system is not the place to fix what society does or does not value, or for something it values, how highly. It's like looking under a streetlight for your contact lens that you lost in the alley "because the light's better".

I personally do not value blue collar labor, such as road construction, since I believe the infrastructure problem can be solved once by laying down utility tunnels. There's no reason that AT&T needs to come by, rip up my street, and do a half-assed repaving job, then PG&E comes by and rips up the same street for gas lines, and then does a half-assed repaving job, and then the water district come along and rips up the same street for the water, and does a half-assed repaving job, and then the sewer people come along and rip up the same street and does a half-assed repaving job, and then Sprint comes in to lay a fiber optic line, and rips up the same street and does a half-assed repaving job.

And the people doing the repaving each time are the same people the city contracts with to do paving in the first place. These are the same people, who, when it was rumored that there might be budget cuts, guaranteed that they wouldn't be the ones cut by *starting and not finishing* all the scheduled projects on the books for the next two years so that the city would have to keep them on and not cut them so that they could repair all the damage they did from starting the jobs and not finishing them. Note that this was all on *rumored* cutbacks, not the real deal.

You want me to value them, then get them to act professionally; and yes, that includes turning out the lights when they are the last person to leave an office that's being shut down due to budget cutbacks. Anyone here who's ever worked for a failed startup, or a failed established company, can tell you whether or not they acted professionally. Most have.

What about insulin for diabetics? What about glasses for myopic or presbiopic people, or publishing anything at all in Braile, along with the manufacture of white sticks? What about Erucic acid for Adrenoleukodystrophy? What about cyanocobalamin/hydroxocobalamin injections for pernicious anemia? What about iron supplements for women?

There are plenty of us who would be dead now, had we been born in the 1200's; insulin dependent diabetics (type I diabetes) were pretty much dead until the 1920's, and later than that, if they couldn't afford the private manufacturing costs for ongoing treatment - assuming they were even correctly diagnosed in time.

We've been "preventing" natural selection ever since we first started dabbling in medicine in prehistory, and earlier than that, if you include appointing "minders" to keep the tribes near-sighted oral history from walking off a cliff.

Would it be great if we could all be genetically perfect? Yeah. But I'm not willing to buy into the idea of some eugenically managed "naturalist" utopian ideal to get there.

Technically, you only have to pull between the adjacent boxes on either end. If you always put a junction box where the cable enters the wall, and make your connections there, and it has a cover plate, you are talking about, st most, the distance between the junction box and the first outlet, or the distance between outlest, worth of cable replacement, since they are end-pointed each time they enter a junction or outlet box.

Doing the fitting through a hole cut with a keyhole saw is relatively easy, and you've got the junction and other outlet box open for the re-pull of the wire, so you have access, assuming grommeted boxed, to move the conduit horizontally in the wall to make the connection. Appleton, Thomas & Betts, and others all sell grometted PVC junction and outlet boxes that would permit this.

It's tough for me to get excited by dry-walling in an area which is using wood panelling, and so would be very expensive to repair. But even without that as an added cost, the color matching for spot painting, or the repainting of the whole wall, kind of offset the relative cheapness of the drywall work for painted walls.

I typically used 3/4 PVC conduit, which is rated for NM-B Romex, but then most of my work has been places like ski areas, which are in fact commercial (which answers the other posters comment about 24" not being necessary for non-fire walls in residential. But of course, if you have an oven on the other side of the wall, it *is* a fire wall.

If you have a single level house with attic access, you can always do this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27uUb2SSCOU

But the situation wasn't really defined that narrowly. If I'm in the center floor in a house with a second story and a finished basement, my way works better. If I'm in the center floor of a house with a second floor and an unfinished basement, I could push the Romex up without a conduit instead of dropping it down without a conduit, but if a future resident finisheshes the basement later, they are screwed. It's better to plan ahead for modifications.

PS: All that said, it's also generally a good idea for steel-stud construction to grommet an unused set of holes and run two lines of plastic twine through it, in case you need to lay Cat 6 or home theater, or other wiring at some future point, and you don't want to tear the crap out of your walls. For stick-built, you can drill holes and plate-protect them to do the same thing, but in commercial, I'd once again do conduit.

This upgrade in computing power is to move the US from 3DVAR to 4DVAR, however, it does nothing to improve the US weather models. This is interesting, in that 4DVAR can give worse results than 3DVAR, while using additional compute power. There was a nice paper written in this:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1256/qj.05.85/asset/200513161304_ftp.pdf

"The first proviso is that on other measures of analysis quality the conclusions are less clear cut. For instance, Fig. 5 shows that using evolved covariances gives worse fits for synoptic 4D-Var than 3D-Var with FGAT. Despite the 4D-Var schemes giving better forecasts overall, their analyses are not consistently better. An explanation may be that the evolved covariances used in 4D-Var (see appendix) increase the background error and hence the impact of observations in modes growing in the time-window, and that this improves the analysis and hence the forecast if these modes continue to grow. This effect was discussed by The paut et al. (1996) who showed that the evolved covariances implicit in 4D-Var are very similar to the singular vectors representing the fastest growing modes. This effect is strongest for longer evolutions; most of The paut et al.’s results are for 24 hours rather than the 3 hours in this paper. For a 6-hour window they see some decaying modes, which they attribute to discrepancies between the 3D- Var covariances and the PF dynamics which is used to evolve them. There are also probably biases in the simple PF model, which may distort the evolved covariances. For these decaying or distorted structures 3D-Var has more freedom to fit the observations, so 4D-Var analyses can be worse."

"whether it'll alter Tumblr's DNA in order to make the latter more of a significant cash generator"

Perhaps they could first make Yahoo a significant cash generator, and when they have a proven method for that, THEN apply it to Tumblr and other properties.

No, you:

1: Cut the conduit to run it into the outlet box
2: Pull new Romex from the endpoint box, and use a portion of the wire, using the existing Romex for the pull.
3. This gives you enough wire on both sides to go into the outlet box. You DO NOT TEE.
4. As long as you are not putting boxes closer than 24" on either side of the wall (fire issue), this is fine.
5. This complies with 2011 NEC (National Electrical Code) requirements

So your assumption about T-ing things, at least without a junction box, is a broken assumption in the first place, so the rest of your condemnation is invalid, since it follows from that. (I was first licensed as an electrical contractor at age 15).

This is generally not a do-it-yourself, unless you have a licensed contractor involved, or are willing to have it inspected by a licensed contractor prior to sale of the house, should you do it yourself. Also, any do-it-yourself electrical or plumbing has to be listed on the disclosure for the property, by law, at least in California.

Whereas drilling a hole and just running a 12 gauge Romex through it horizontally makes the wall more stable?

The ability to do horizontal runs is why there exist "wire protection plates" / "conduit protection plates. Obviously, you do not want a large number of horizontal holes in load bearing 2x4 walls, but then that is why you use 2x6 for them instead of 2x4, at least for stick-built houses. If you use metal studs, they typically have either punch-outs, or just have pre-punched holes (depending on brand) that line up horizontally.

Almost all plumbing off a vertical stand-pipe requires horizontal holes through the studs, particularly if you are going to a "free standing" or "pedestal" vanity, so that they water cut-offs and hookup pipes are not in the open, and they don't end up looking like hell. Anyone who doesn't hide this stuff in the wall is someone who is either flipping the property, or really doesn't give a damn because they plan on renting the property.

Voting for either party is like living at home...

The Republicans want to be your dad:

o "You're not going to get away with that crap with me! Go to your room!"
o "Military services would straighten you right out!"
o "If you want spending money, put down the remote control and get a damn job!"
o "No daughter of mine is getting a damn abortion!" ...

The Democrats want to be your mom:

o "Maybe if you gave that Kim Jong boy a chance, you'd find out he's no really a bully, and is fun to play with!"
o "Don't tell your dad I gave you this, but here's $20 for gas; you kids have a nice time!"
o "You hurt your knee? Come here, and let mommy kiss it better!"
o "OK honey, we've had 'the talk'; should we go to the doctor and get you some birth control?" ...

Either way, you're living at home, and you never grow up.

Meanwhile, the Green party is lowering buckets on a rope from the trees they are camped out in to prevent them being cut down, and the Libertarian party is living in the cardboard box near the dumpster because they think matching funds are a "gub'mint handout!" and refuse to take charity. Not to be confused with the Objectivists, who also won't take handouts, but it's not enough for them to not take handouts, they won't give them, and if someone does give them, they won't let you take them. To translate: your aunt with all the cats, your mom's alcoholic brother, and your dad's sister who's married to the banker but cheating with the pool boy because she's unhappy.

One big, happy family.

This is why you run wires in conduit at a uniform height in every wall: knock a hole at the right height, put in a new outlet. You may have to pull new wires to get sufficient length to make the connection, but you can pull them in from whatever's on the other end.

The only thing you have to worry about, practically, is amperage load per line, so you don't end up with too many outlets on a single set of wires.

This is similar to the idea that the streets should have utility tunnels, rather than buried pipes, so that you can run new cables, fiber optics, waveguides, or whatever technology we haven't thought up yet, without tearing the streets to crap. There are new subdivisions which have this type of infrastructure, but cities are generally too stupid to do public utility reworks this way (or too smart; union payola?) since if you are trenching and cementing anyway, the biggest cost is in the excavation, not the materials. Redwood City, California is actually doing this type of work right now for access to the light rail, and it's the right way to do it for a 25% additional marginal cost.

Is the end goal of life a high salary?

I understand his advice, if followed, and if you work your way, either through trade school or apprenticeship, to journeyman, and then to master, you can expect a $80K+ a year income.

Is this the end-all, be-all of human existence?

A high salary is not why I went into the sciences - I went in with a passion for knowledge and knowing how things work, and why, and how to build things that, because they were barely within the boundaries of the rules, did amazing and astonishing things. A high salary resulted because I was successful at pursuing this passion.

I would instead advise people to try to find three things for which they feel passion, and are good at, and then find someone willing to pay you to do one of them.

If you can only find one thing for which you have passion, if you can still find someone to pay you to do it, then you are ahead of the game, compared to what Bloomberg suggest, if it happens that none of your objects of passion include plumbing.

There are plenty of people who look at the top end paychecks available in a profession, and choose a profession on that basis. Those who do will never reach the top end of that pay range if they do not posses a passion for the profession; they will always be middle tier, and they will watch the clock until it is time to check out from their job, and "get back to their 'real' life". This is where a lot of unemployed IT "professionals" come from.

For those clock watching 8 hours of their day, they will be miserable, working at something for which they have no passion, having intentionally turned their soul off for those eight hours in exchange for money. They will sell half their waking life into misery to benefit the other half of their waking life. And at the end of the day in their "real life", they will find they can not take joy in their "real life", as they anticipate, after sleeping, returning to their job for the next 8 soulless hours of work.

Do something you love, and for which you have passion; reclaim your soul for those lost 8 hours of your life.